Video: Debunking New Orleans myths

WASHINGTON — It's become a strongly held belief by some in the storm zone — the idea that the destruction of New Orleans’ heavily poor, heavily black Ninth Ward was neither an accident nor an act of nature.

Dyan French, also known as “Mama D,” is a New Orleans Citizen and Community Leader. She testified before the House Select Committee on Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday.

“I was on my front porch. I have witnesses that they bombed the walls of the levee, boom, boom!” Mama D said, holding her head. “Mister, I'll never forget it.”

“Certainly appears to me to be an act of genocide and of ethnic cleansing,” Leah Hodges, another New Orleans citizen, told the committee.

Similar statements, sometimes couched as rumors, have also been voiced by Louis Farrakhan, leader of the nation of Islam, and director Spike Lee.

“I don't find it too far-fetched,” Lee said in a recent television interview, “that they try to displace all the black people out of New Orleans.”

Harvard's Alvin Pouissant says such conspiracy theories are fueled by years of government neglect and discrimination against blacks: slavery, segregation and the Tuskegee experiments, during which poor blacks were used to test the effects of syphilis.